These 5 Types of Content Will Immediately Push You to Page #1

One question we tend to get asked a lot here at Small SEO Tools is: "What is the best type of content for SEO?"You'd agree that as far as the Internet goes, "content is king." Essentially, this phrase has been referenced countless times on the web, and it is indeed a proven fact. Why? Because without content, the Internet would have been just another large empty space.

In fact, the phrase “content is king” is not exactly new. It was [likely first] stated by Bill Gates in January 1996, when he wrote an essay titled “Content is King” published on the Microsoft website. In it, the billionaire described the future of the Internet as a marketplace for content. Today, there are over 1.7 billion websites and blogs on the Internet, close to 10 billion mobile connections (active devices) including licensed cellular IoT, and social media is booming like crazy with literally billions of users all over the world. But at the center of it all is CONTENT.

And it is no different for Search Engine Optimization. For your website to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you need content. But all content is not the same: some are great for building engagement, while others are great for making straight-up company announcements. Some are good for nurturing leads, and others are just great for entertainment.

The big question: What's the best type of content for SEO?Turns out it is not every type of content that works great for ranking in the SERPs. If you want your content to appear at the top of search engine result pages, make sure that it doesn’t contain any sort of plagiarism. Search engines admire original content and they rank web pages containing unique data above the sources with duplicated content. Hence, we recommend you make use of an online plagiarism checker and conduct a duplication test to identify the traces of plagiarism.

If you're looking to hit it big in the search engines, you'd have to create content that works. This becomes even more realistic when you know that 91% of content on the web gets zero traffic from Google.

So what content works for SEO? Let's explore those!
 

1. HOW-TO POSTS
 

Can you guess how many times you've tried running a search on Google, but found yourself starting it with "how to…"?Well, you're not alone. How-to posts get a lot of love from searchers. That's why Google ranks them higher. And that's why you need to start creating more how-to content. Why does this type of content rank high? It's simple: How-to posts teach people *how to* do stuff. And that's basically what people mostly search for. They want to know how to build an app, how to cheat in exams, and even how to impress a girl. Basically, how to do anything. You get the point!

A how-to content usually describes how to accomplish a specific task and is usually meant to help non-experts.
 

2. ONLINE VIDEOS
 

If you've noticed, Google tends to rank a lot of YouTube videos these days.

Why not? There are literally billions of hours of video content online and YouTube has even become the second most visited site on the Internet after Google (bigger than Facebook). A certain report states that almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. Online videos are the new awesome. Google loves them. If you've been trying to hit the search limelight with the traditional text-based content but aren't very happy with your results, it's time to give the video a try. Your videos can either rank directly from YouTube or you can embed them in your blog posts.
 

3. LISTICLES
 

Listicles (or list articles) have been proven to be the most popular type of online content, not only with search engines but with users as well. This is because list articles simply list items, thereby giving people a sort of overview of what they may be looking for. This very post you're reading right now is a listicle. Apart from searchers mostly beginning their search operations with the "how-to" attribute, the other major way people search for information is a list. For example, "10 ways to…", "5 types of…", 20 things to do in…" and so on. Google also loves to display list articles as featured snippets.

4. PHOTOS AND VISUALS
 

Whether it is trending memes, visualized data, infographics or any other type of visual-based content, you can find your way into Google’s top-ranking with images. In fact, Google does go as far as including images and visuals in the traditional search results.

Besides using Google’s traditional search results from the images tab, you can turn to the reverse image search online tool. This facility allows you to make picture-based searches and pull results over the web from Google Images, Yandex, and Bing.

With billions of people searching Google Images every day, images and visuals can be your secret weapon for getting extra traffic to your site. But here's what: You'll need to optimize the images for SEO. For one, in the eyes of the search robots, images are just plain pictures without any description of what they are. So, you would need to add short descriptions with appropriate keywords, alt attribute specifying an alternate text for the image if it cannot be displayed, and a title attribute which is the text a user sees when hovering over the image.
 

5. ULTIMATE GUIDES
 

When it comes to building authority, ultimate guides are the go-to materials. But not just that, ultimate guides are super great for top rankings. Why? Because Google loves them. Ultimate guides give an abundance of information on the topic it is written on and so both search engines and people trust it. For the record, ultimate guides are long-form content pieces that are designed to educate readers extensively on a given topic. They contain enough details to provide the reader with all the information they need about the topic so that the reader does not look for help elsewhere. When people start treating your website in this manner, not only do they view you as an authority in your niche, but will trust you and keep coming back for more. Additionally, Google and other search engines will start according to you your deserved place of respect in the SERPs.
 

THE SECRET TO RANKING ANY CONTENT
 

In conclusion, we'd like to say that content does not just rank because of the "type" of format it is written in. Rather, there are certain characteristics your content must possess for it to rank high on SERPs.You may create all these types of content but they may not necessarily rank super high without the right optimizations. This list is to tell you that, WITH THE RIGHT RANKING ELEMENTS IN PLACE, and all things being equal, these listed content formats do appear more regularly atop Google. So what are the elements that must be present for your content to rank?

• The right keywords

• Backlinks to the page on which the content sits

• The relevance of your content to the searcher's intent

• Appropriate optimization of keywords (like adding it to h1, h2, h3 tags, etc., and in the first/last paragraphs of your post, etc.).

• The right implementation of the right on-page SEO (including internal links, meta tags, etc.)

• Mobile-friendliness

• The page loading speed of the particular page on which the content is on

• Evergreen-ness (although this is not applicable to some content types like news articles)

• Long-form relativity

• Last but not least your content is free from any sort of duplication.

These and many more tactics which we regularly share on our blog can help your content rank higher especially when using any of the hot content formats listed above. And remember, this list is not exhaustive as there are several other types of content for SEO.